The Tour de France's Tech TransformationJuly 3, 2015
The 102nd running of the longest sporting event in the world, the Tour de France, begins Saturday. The race first took place in 1903, and it has continued every year since, except during WWI and WWII. In the 112 years since that first race, the technology utilized by the riders has changed dramatically. Today, the racers ride bikes with frames made of advanced carbon fiber.

Hush! Everybody's Listening!May 27, 2015
Americans have been spied on by their own government for far longer than most realized, it turns out, and the United States National Security Agency's surveillance activities are just the tip of the iceberg. The FBI, which repeatedly has expressed dismay at Google and Apple securing their mobile OSes reportedly has become a major player in administering the NSA's warrantless surveillance program.

CRM's 'Show Me' Video RevolutionMay 19, 2015
Cellphone videos have become a widely used tool to document everything from kids' antics to police brutality. They are shaking up the TV news industry, and they soon may revolutionize customer relationship management. Take, for instance, LogMeIn's video-aided support tool, Rescue Lens, or Support.com's remote video support service, Nexus SuppportCam.

Fresh Takes on Shipping Perishable Online PurchasesMay 15, 2015
It's one thing to ship books and electronics across the U.S. -- but it's quite another to get fresh fruit, baked goods, meat, fish, prepared meals, raw meal ingredients, and other perishables to consumers' front doors in prime condition. Once perishables are delivered to a customer's door, they often have to sit there for an unpredictable amount of time before the customer gets home.

The US Government vs. E-CommerceMay 12, 2015
"The chief business of the American people is business," President Calvin Coolidge said. Although that has become the country's rubric, lawmakers in the United States aren't inclined to give business free rein. The Justice Department last month trumpeted its first online marketing prosecution: the leveling of felony charges against David Topkins, a former executive of Art.com, for alleged price-fixing.

Government Surveillance: What to Do, What to Do?April 21, 2015
The CIA has been trying to hack into iOS for years. British and American agencies reportedly have collaborated to create a map of the Internet and Web users. The United States National Security Agency has, together with the UK's GCHQ, reportedly stolen SIM card encryption keys from Gemalto. The FBI is frothing at the mouth over Google's and Apple's encryption of their mobile OSes.

Proposed Amendments to US Cybersecurity Laws Under ScrutinyMarch 31, 2015
The White House in January proposed updates to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that have stirred controversy within the cybersecurity industry. "If the proposed legislation were to be enacted, it would certainly have a chilling effect on cybersecurity research," said Chris Doggett, managing director at Kaspersky Lab North America.

Docker's No Flash in the PanMarch 24, 2015
Docker -- the open source application container technology that has drawn broad interest from the enterprise IT industry -- recently marked its second birthday. Judging by its growth and traction thus far, and the example set by such open source projects as Linux, Hadoop, Android, OpenStack and Cloud Foundry, expect big things from this young open source software project and community.

The Road Ahead for Self-Driving CarsMarch 19, 2015
While several automakers are currently in the process of developing autonomous vehicles, the road ahead for self-driving cars could be long, with numerous obstacles to overcome. According to the recent Autonomous Vehicles 2015-2035 report, published by IDTechEx, the challenges and technology have much in common. So far, progress toward a completely driverless car is in the slow lane.

Mobile Wallets as Credit Card KillersMarch 9, 2015
Years have spent trying to oust the credit card as the ultimate payment method. Publications and pundits have been quick to hail new technologies as "credit card-killers," and they're not without justification. The credit card has lost whatever futuristic luster it may have once had. Magnetic stripes wear out, plastic snaps in half, and the incessant manual inputting of 16-digit numbers becomes tiresome.

Bracing for the Cyberthreat DelugeMarch 6, 2015
Almost 17,000 malware alerts surface every week, the Ponemon Institute recently found. Only 4 percent of alerts were investigated, and traditional antivirus products missed nearly 70 percent of malware in the first hour, researchers discovered in a recent Damballa study.
Rescanning led to identification of 66 percent of the malware in 24 hours and 72 percent after seven days.

The Great War's Untapped Video Game OpportunitiesMarch 5, 2015
It's fair to say that game developers have missed an opportunity with World War I. It was the first conflict to see aircraft used in combat, the first to see tanks and other armored vehicles make an appearance on the battlefield, and the first war in more than a century to completely draw in the major powers of the world. WWI should be a setting ripe for action and strategy games.

Open Source vs. Proprietary Firms on the IoT BattlegroundFebruary 25, 2015
A battle is brewing over control of the Internet of Things marketplace. Consumers see only convenience and extensions to their always-on mobile devices. Product makers see a pathway to streaming data that can be monetized from buyers' connections. Will history repeat itself, as open source begins to take on the current, yet unsustainable, walled-garden core of the IoT?

Making Sense of the Muddled In-Home Entertainment MarketFebruary 20, 2015
The global access and entertainment services marketplace continues its pace of dramatic change, as broadband services achieve new levels of penetration and speed worldwide. Emerging markets are experiencing rapid growth, as many homes obtain high-speed broadband services for the first time. Pay TV is seeing a similar pattern in global growth.

Video Game Preservation: An Impossible Dream?February 20, 2015
Fuel Industries last year sought to find the long-rumored cache of buried E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial video games, made for the Atari 2600 in the early 1980s. Surplus copies of E.T. -- a notoriously bad gaming experience -- were dumped in a landfill after failing to sell. By burying its shame, Atari hoped to wipe the title from the gaming community's collective consciousness.

Are Call Centers Ready for the Internet of Things?February 17, 2015
The IoT represents a wealth of untapped riches -- and there's no shortage of data highlighting the potential this technology has for the economy. The demand is there, as is the supply. However, there's one piece that may or may not be missing, depending on whom you ask: the back end capacity to handle the information these devices will generate.

Virtual Reality a Sports Training Game ChangerFebruary 6, 2015
Quite a bit of buzz broke out recently in sports circles when the Stanford quarterback was caught on ESPN sporting an Oculus virtual reality (VR) face mask. Not that VR is totally new, but fans want more out of their athletes and the sight of such a souped-up technical edge on the field was a novel thrill. But that thrill won't be novel for long as VR is headed for mainstream use in all sports.

IoT Risky Business for Enterprise NetworksFebruary 5, 2015
There were 9 billion Internet of Things units installed at the end of 2013 -- and analysts expect the figure to hit 28 billion by 2020. That's going to make life difficult for IT security admins. A Tripwire survey found that employed consumers who took work home had an average of 11 IoT devices on their home networks, and 24 percent of them had connected at least one of these devices to their enterprise network.

HandBrake Video Transcoder Gets a Grip on LinuxFebruary 5, 2015
Converting video files from a variety of media sources can be a huge chore. That task can be much more manageable with HandBrake, a GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder. It is available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows, which makes working on more than one platform a bit more convenient. The latest version for Linux, version 0.10 released Nov. 23, has many upgrades.

'Smart Spaces' Project Seeks to Light Up NetworksFebruary 5, 2015
Dartmouth University researchers are shining a new light on using "smart spaces" in ambient room lighting to transmit both data and human gestures. This technology enables so-called smart spaces to separate shadows from light in real time. Thus, the light spectrum is able to carry high-speed data wirelessly without interruption between smart devices.

A Personal Power Plant in the Palm of Your HandFebruary 4, 2015
The problem with most portable battery-based chargers is that you still need to plug them into a wall socket to gain a charge. While some inventors have turned to solar, or even wind power, for off-the-grid power sources, solar and wind power take time and require Mother Nature to provide sun or wind. Enter Kraftwerk, a fuel-based hand-held portable generator that has launched as a Kickstarter project.

Understanding New Lighting TechnologyFebruary 4, 2015
It is in the darkest time of the year with the arrival of winter that perhaps we most appreciate our light bulbs. It isn't just the lights on the holiday decorations that provide that festive glow, but really the fact that the light bulb makes our daily modern life possible. The light bulb is taken for granted, and until recently it hadn't really
evolved much in more than a century.

Open Source at the Front of the ClassFebruary 2, 2015
Open source is sitting at the head of the class in a growing number of schools with all levels of education. Its no-cost starting point and use-it-your-way flexibility gives open source technology an advantage over proprietary solutions with its no-license and no-fee lesson plan. Don't think so? LinuxInsider spoke with several technology administrators around the country who gave their open source experiences a solid A+.

Debian Forked: All for Devuan and Devuan for All?January 26, 2015
A group of developers made good on their threats to fork Debian Linux late last year, after the community's leadership voted to replace sysvinit with systemd, making systemd the default init boot process. The Debian Technical Committee's decision spurred several key Debian developers and project maintainers to resign. Some of them formed a new community dedicated to forking Debian.